“The final outcome of critical consciousness, however, need not be that we are sure of nothing. It can lead to our being graced with a ‘second naïveté.’ We are indebted to philosopher Paul Ricouer for that happy phrase….. Having come to recognize that things could theoretically be other than they are, we are brought to the perception that they are as we thought them to be; but on the far side of all our questioning, we know that in a way we did not know it before.”

Richard John Neuhaus Death on a Friday Afternoon [I believe it’s from that book though my notes were slightly cryptic and in any case it’s definitely Neuhaus]

“Evil ideas are at the root of all this enormous evil which plagues the world at present.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 2, 1917, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you place the blame.”

Oscar Wilde [widely quoted online but I do not have a more precise attribution].

In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.

“Carissimi, when praised for the ease and grace of his melodies, exclaimed, ‘Ah! you little know with what difficulty this ease has been acquired.’ Sir Joshua Reynolds, when once asked how long it had taken him to paint a certain picture, replied, ‘All my life.’”

Samuel Smiles Self-Help

“It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that ‘where there is no vision the people perish.’ But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, July 30, 1910, quoted in “GKC on Scripture – Conducted by Peter Floriani” “Proverbs Part 2” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the G.K. Chesterton Society Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)

“Outspirational.”

Me on something that absolutely failed to engage my enthusiasm February 2000.

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

C.S. Lewis, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser September 4, 2022.